Wednesday, 29 June 2016

What's new in stress-ng 0.06.07?

Since my last blog post about stress-ng, I've pushed out several more small releases that incorporate new features and (as ever) a bunch more bug fixes. I've been eyeballing gcov kernel coverage stats to find more regions in the kernel where stress-ng needs to exercise. Also, testing on a range of hardware (arm64, s390x, etc) and a range of kernels has eeked out some bugs and helped me to improve stress-ng. So what's new?

stackmmap - allocates a 2MB stack that is memory mapped onto a temporary file. A recursive function works down the stack and flushes dirty stack pages back to the memory mapped file using msync(2) until the end of the stack is reached (stack overflow). This exercises dirty page and stack exception handling.